Tutorials

Learn how to recreate a 3D typographic effect using Cinema 4D and Photoshop. You can watch the video tutorial version here.

Step 1; First create a text object and use a bold font like Gill Sans Ultra Bold. Then create an Extrude Nurbs object and place the Text object into it.

You’ll want the “D” to be bold so that we have plenty of room for the door. I also capitalized all the words so that none of the letters would penetrate through the floor.

Step 2; Next create a polygoncube and resize it to fit the size of the door. Then move it so it’s overlapping the “D” in the door type, we’ll use this to create the hole in the letter “D.”

Next create a Boole object and put the Extrude Nurbs and the Cube into it. The order is very important with the Boole object, put the Extrude Nurbs above the Cube object so that the cube is cutting a hole out of the “D.”

Step 3; Now make a door by creating a few more cubes, one for the door itself and the other for the door knob base. Then create a sphere for the door knob.

Step 4; Ok now we’re going to create a light for the inside of the door. I used an Omni light with Soft Shadows turned on and with Visible Light set to Volumetric.

Step 5; Now light the rest of your image so that we can see the rest of the text. For me I added three more Omni lights with Soft Shadows turned on. I placed one in the front (key light), one off to the side (fill light) and one in the back (back light).

The image below is the final effect achieved with all my lights plus Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion turned on.

Step 6; Now render out your image and bring into Photoshop to apply some additional effects to it. First let’s add some color to the image. You’ll notice that I rendered my image from Cinema 4d as a grayscale image instead of giving it a texture in the software itself. The reason is because we can use a Gradient Map in Photoshop to add color to our image. Just click on the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers menu and select “Gradient Map.”

Here are the colors I set my Gradient Map to:

Step 7; Ok now create another Adjustment Layer like a Curves or Levels to tweak the image further, we’ll want to give it a little more contrast.

Step 8; Ok now to create a shallow depth of field by blurring the image as it goes into the background. You can render a Depth pass from Cinema 4D to use as a mask in Photoshop. I didn’t like Depth pass that was rendered out for my image so I went back into Cinema 4d and rendered out a custom one. I disabled all the current lights and created a single spotlight and lit it from the side.

Step 9; Ok back in Photoshop, duplicate the door layer and apply a Gaussian Blur to it. Then create an image mask and paste the new depth map into it. Of course now the image looks like it’s blurring in the foreground instead of the background. To fix this just invert the depth image and you should see the background is blurry and not the foreground.

Step 10; Ok last part, let’s create a vignette. Start by creating a new layer and filling it in a solid black color.

Step 11; Next use the circle selection tool and draw a circle across the entire image. Then go up into the Selection menu / Modify / Feather. When the pop up menu appears use a setting like 75 or higher.

Now click on the image mask icon at the bottom of the Layers menu and invert your mask.

And there you go, you should have an image that looks like the one above.